Since the 1990s, the Chemical Brothers has been house-cleaning music for me (Exit Planet Dust lol). And I recently listened to the Underworld album in an airplane on the tarmac at Charles De Gaulle. It’s great music to take off to. I feel like both these late-career albums are as good as anything they’ve ever done.

I haven’t rly been listening to much music that isn’t made for a dance floor these days, but I really love those Dean Blunt albums. Black Metal is also superb, as is Stone Island which I don’t think is released officially. There’s a newer album he did with Joanne Robertson I’ve been meaning to listen to properly (can’t remember if it’s had a proper release). I also like bits and bobs he puts on YouTube that may not get put on projects.

Also agree with the love for Classical Curves. Obviously v influential, I think it will be interesting to see (as a person from the UK) if there’s a UK scene that will emerge that takes the ideas forward, taking that Jersey / Bmore / ballroom kind of influence and putting a novel spin on it without being too repetitive or derivative of the American forms. I think it could well happen, there have been (and continue to be) various attempts and I think it could go in interesting directions if younger producers emerging now become engaged with it.

I did also think Dream A Garden and the related more DJ focused rework 12”s were great too. It was great to see a quite explicitly political work, something for those of us for whom the future looks pretty bleak but who are constantly told that there is no alternative to the current social and economic arrangements. To me it’s like Classical Curves represents the weird mechanical alienation of the world as it is, and Dream A Garden has a sort of more organic, loved up feel that represents some of the values that our world has lost, and the aspiration to build a better world based on a less individualistic culture.

The other thing id mention is Micachu & The Shapes. Mica Levi is now getting a lot of props for soundtrack and experimental work, but the Micachu albums are all fantastic. Very very skewed pop. There are a few mixtapes about too like a bizarre one of the Chopped And Screwed thing they did with an orchestra, mangled and turned into these raw, intense beats with Brother May MCing over the top in an unusually improvisational way. Really diverse output but with quite a singular vision. They are also a phenomenal live band, you can get an idea through a Boiler Room set they did, but seeing them in person with proper amplification is well worth doing. They tour pretty irregularly iirc.

I did a Valentines Day mix that draws on all 3, particularly Blunt and Micachu who I think write very affectingly about love and attraction and jealousy and all those things.